UCC Library and UCC researchers have made this item openly available. Please let us know how this has helped you. Thanks! Title Introduction: Reframing the religious underground Author(s) Kapalό, James A.; Povedák, Kinga Publication date 2021-08-13 Original citation Kapaló, J. A. and Povedák, K. (2021) ‘Introduction: Reframing the Religious Underground’, in Kapaló, J. A. and Povedák, K. (eds)., The Secret Police and the Religious Underground in Communist and Post- Communist Eastern Europe, Routledge. isbn: 9780367279998. Type of publication Article (peer-reviewed) Link to publisher's http://www.routledge.com/9780367279998 version Access to the full text of the published version may require a subscription. Item downloaded http://hdl.handle.net/10468/11294 from Downloaded on 2021-09-27T11:04:53Z Introduction: Reframing the Religious Underground James A. Kapaló and Kinga Povedák Orcid.org/0000-0001-6920-8828 Orcid.org/0000-0003-1182-5836 Abstract In this extended introduction, the editors of this volume explore the contours of the emerging field of research on the religious underground and secret police archives. The introduction addresses a number of key concepts that frame this edited collection, including an exploration of the formation of the religious underground and its meaning in the Cold War, the significance of the secret police and their role in anti-religious operations. Following this, the introduction addresses the politics, ethics and uses of secret police archives in post-communism as well as introducing emerging methodological approaches to the archives. Drawing on insights from the case studies included in the volume, the editors suggest important areas of future research in the field. As one of the primary instruments of political control and social change both in the Soviet Union and in the satellite states in Eastern Europe, the secret police played a pivotal role in most, if not all, anti-religious operations launched during the communist period. They did so with specially trained, dedicated units established to counter the activities of enemies labelled as “clerical reactionary forces”, “spies” or “saboteurs” and to prevent the pernicious influence on socialist society of superstition, religious charlatanry and economic exploitation; all of which were associated with the activities of the so-called religious underground. Following the establishment of Soviet power, and in close collaboration with the relevant government ministries, commissions and agencies, the secret police were charged with maintaining the social order, which entailed identifying, surveilling and infiltrating religious communities in order to undermine, eliminate or control them from within. As Soviet influence and domination extended into Central and Eastern Europe following the Second World War, anti-religious and anti-sect policies were adopted and enacted - in some cases wholesale, in others only piecemeal - by the new subject regimes and their own recently formed secret police forces. 1 In the context of the Cold War, the fate of religious leaders, Church institutions and ordinary believers became a cause célèbre of the West, where society was mobilised in the name of the defence of religion against atheism and an image was projected of defiant priests and pastors engaged in a serious game of cat and mouse with the secret police. This image of a religious underground, which was based on the testimonies and reports of religious dissidents and émigrés, was promoted by Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty that claimed to be able to report on the realities behind the Iron Curtain but were themselves of course heavily biased by Western perceptions of what life must have been like there (Kasprzak 2004). Between the official Soviet narrative of the “victorious war against superstition” and the corresponding “religious narrative of martyrdom” (Kelly 2012, 305) which was disseminated in the West, there was a much more complex lived reality in which violent persecution and repression at the hands of the secret police formed only a part. Accommodation, compromise and collaboration were also central to this relationship. The religious communities that came to be referred to as the religious underground, however, were not devoid of agency; they were able to deploy creative means not only of avoiding arrest, foiling agents and uncover informers but also to establish resilient, viable and meaningful lifeworlds beyond the strictures and confines of officially prescribed lives in the factory or on the collective farm. Following the fall of the communist regimes in the region, scholars have gained a considerable, if also extremely problematic, new resource for the study of religions. In many states, the communist secret police left behind a vast archival collection that meticulously catalogued the complexity of their information gathering and repressive operations from brutal mass deportations, undercover operations and interrogations, to the subtle manipulations and creative fabrications of secret agents. The archives of the secret police have been at the heart of an urgent re-examination of the legacy of communism aimed at “clarifying the past, uncovering the truth, and furthering the search for justice” (Apor et al. 2017, 1). The truth and justice projects pursued through the archives have proven highly contentious, exacerbating the particular ethical and epistemological challenges that confront scholars of religions working with secret police materials. This volume engages the incontestable abundance and incontrovertible complexity of secret police archival documents with the aim of fostering new methodological approaches and comparative research on the complex intersection of religion and state security in the communist and post-communist context. The authors included in this volume recognise, however, that the secret police archives, especially when approached as stand-alone sources, have their limits. Several authors in this volume are at the forefront of 2 endeavours to engage the archives in dialogue with other sources and their contributions draw on the archives of religious communities, contemporary testimonies and oral historical interviews. In addition to contributing to our understanding of the history of Church-state relations, of communist-era state security, and indeed of religion under communism in general, this volume also aims to inform our understanding of the role of memory politics in post- communist societies, questions of democratic rights and freedoms of minority groups, the roots and legacy of activism and dissent in the region and the very question of the value and status of truth and trust in contemporary society. Comparative endeavours in relation to the varied experiences of communism in Eastern and Central Europe are relatively rare, and especially with regards to religion under communism (one notable exception is Ramet 1998), as most scholarship has, as Blaive (2018, 1) points out, tended to emphasise national exceptionalism over “a systematic approach to understanding communism as an international social phenomenon.” The diversity of the religious field in Central and Eastern Europe, with its mix of Catholic and Orthodox majority states, significant Protestant communities and its bewildering array of religious minorities and ethno-religious groups, has also mitigated against taking a regional approach in favour of pursuing research projects based on confessional particularity. Whilst regional studies of Orthodoxy, Protestant Churches or the Catholic Church under communism have explored the particular circumstances of their encounter with hostile communist regimes (see for example Kosicki 2016; Leustean 2009; Michel 1991; Ramet ed. 1988, 1990, 1992), this volume, rather than drawing a distinction along confessional lines, approaches the diversity of religious activity targeted by the state through the lens of the ‘religious underground’, a label that was used both by the communist secret police and by those resisting them. This term, which has both a literal and a metaphorical meaning, came to refer to all unregistered or legally proscribed religious communities that were the target of the secret police from the earliest days following the Bolshevik Revolution until well into the 1980s. We have drawn together studies from both the Soviet Union (Ukraine, Moldova and Lithuania) and a number of satellite communist countries (Hungary, Romania, Czechoslovakia, and Poland) as well as Yugoslavia) in order to highlight the commonalities and divergent practices through time of the secret police in their anti-religious operations and to explore the various ways in which religious communities responded to them. The studies collected here deal mainly with Christian Churches and communities in the European territories of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe 3 (with the notable exception of Chapter 8 by Pranskevičiūtė-Amoson who explores the secret police campaign against Krishna Consciousness (ISKCON) in Lithuania). Religious discrimination, ranging from the bureaucratic to the violent and genocidal, has been an integral part of human history up to the present day, even in democratic societies and the targeting of religious communities by state security agencies in the twentieth century was by no means limited to the communist world. Looking beyond Eastern Europe there are many obvious opportunities for comparative analysis and reflection. In the US, the FBI has in the course of the twentieth century targeted numerous religious